The background description provided herein gives context for the present disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art.
Vehicle lights are old and well known. Countless forms of vehicle lights exist, including: headlights, fog lights, tail lights, reverse lights, parking lights, daytime running lights, and turning lights, among countless others. Each type of light or light configuration serves its own unique purpose and provides its own unique advantages.
With improvements in light technology, such as the development of light emitting diodes (“LEDs”), a great variety of accessory lights have been developed. These accessory lights come in a wide array of configurations and provide their own unique functions and advantages.
One common form of an accessory light is known as a light bar. Light bars are designed to fit in the small space between the upper edge of the bumper and the lower edge of the tailgate of a pickup truck and include a long array of lights that are electrically connected to the electrical system of the vehicle. These light bars provide improved illumination and thereby improve visibility when breaking, turning and backing up.
While conventional light bars provide many advantages, they suffer from many disadvantages not solved by the prior art. Namely, the lighting patterns and capabilities of known light bars are either manually set by an operator of the vehicle or interpreted in response to signals directly received from the electrical system of the vehicle, thereby controlling illumination of the LEDs of the light bar. No known light bars include the option to manually set a lighting pattern while simultaneously interpreting signals directly received from the electrical system of the vehicle. Furthermore, there are no known light bars which reconcile whether a manual instruction from an operator of the vehicle or an automatic system for interpreting signals directly received from the electrical system of the vehicle should have priority over the other during simultaneous use.
There exists a need in the art for a light bar that allows the operator to send an input to the light bar for a specific pattern of lights while the light bar simultaneously interprets signals directly received from the electrical system. There exists a further need in the art for a light bar which does not require the user to provide the input for the specific pattern of lights and/or restricts the user to using only a number of predetermined patterns and/or colors. There exists an even further need in the art for a light bar which harmonizes which lights should light up in the event these instructions conflict with one another.